A network for all who care about the conservation of our world and who want to see it achieved with justice, compassion, dignity and honesty.

DRC adopts a strategy that will bolster community forestry, conservation group says.

A new community forestry strategy in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) could help provide Congolese communities with a say in the management of the country’s forests. A group of local and international organizations, government agencies and community groups developed the strategy to strengthen the capacity of provincial authorities and ensure that the country’s community forestry laws do in fact include and benefit communities. The plan calls for an “experimental phase” over the next five years to gradually provide access to areas of the roughly 700,000 square kilometres (more than 270,000 square miles) of available forest through community management permits.

Indigenous Peoples and local communities have been conserving their lands and forests for centuries. But the rise of “fortress conservation” is forcing them from their homes, hurting people and forests alike.

An order passed by the National Tiger Conservation Authority on March 27, 2017 categorically states that the Forest Rights Act (FRA) will not apply in Tiger Reserves. By doing this, the order not only invalidates the rights of communities who live within Tiger Reserves, but also confuses the provisions of the two laws: the Forest Rights Act and the Wildlife Protection Act.

Guest Post by Survival International:

For decades, alarm bells have been ringing over the human rights abuses that WWF is contributing to in the Congo Basin. In its attempt to defend itself (14 October), WWF shows that it is still deaf to these concerns, and prepared to mislead the public.

WWF Violating Indigenous Rights – Complaint Abandoned

Survival International has today abandoned trying to get a resolution to our formal complaint that the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is violating international standards about corporate responsibility, and is reverting to using public pressure to try and stop the abuses.

India’s Kaziranga national park and the Streisand effect.

The controversy over Kaziranga National Park’s brutal anti-poaching policy continues. Over the past 20 years, 106 people have been killed in the park in north-east India. Shockingly, almost half of those people were killed in the past five years.